U.S. House easily approves bill to reduce school violence

U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch speaks on the House floor on March 14, 2018, in support of legislation that would increase federal spending on efforts to prevent school violence. Deutch represents Parkland, the location of the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch speaks on the House floor on March 14, 2018, in support of legislation that would increase federal spending on efforts to prevent school violence. Deutch represents Parkland, the location of the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

As evidenced by the 407 to 10 vote, the legislation doesn’t tackle anything controversial dealing with guns that has been proposed since the Feb. 14 shooting in which a former student killed 17 people and wounded 17 others at the Parkland school.

The STOP School Violence act would provide money to help train students, teachers and administrators to identify and report warning signs of violence. It would create more systems, such as apps, for anonymous reporting. Money also could be used to turn schools into harder targets and to install panic buttons in schools to summon help in emergencies.

One of the original sponsors, U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, urged his colleagues to support the legislation, which he called an “astonishingly modest, yet important first step.” Deutch, a Broward-Palm Beach county Democrat, represents Parkland.

“The STOP School Violence Act is a good bill. It will not solve our gun problem. It won’t ban bump stocks or require Americans to be 21 to buy a gun or fix our broken background check system or get weapons of war — the weapons of choice for mass shooters — off our streets, and out of our communities,” Deutch said. “But it will help troubled students who need help get help.”

Deutch and U.S. Rep. John Rutherford, a Republican and former Jacksonville sheriff, introduced the legislation 15 days before the Stoneman Douglas shooting. The acronym The STOP in the bill’s title stands for Student, Teachers, and Officers Preventing.

Deutch said Congress could have enacted measures to reduce violence by enacting some gun controls after previous mass shootings. He lamented inaction.

“Since Congress has failed the American people by ignoring the deadly scourge of gun violence, since we have failed the families of Stoneman Douglas just like we failed the families of Sandy Hook and Columbine and so many others, we owe it to students and teachers across the country to at least give them tools to help them identify dangerous behavior,” he said.

Deutch said the debate over gun violence is “in a ridiculous place,” exemplified, he said, by the idea of arming teachers. “Armed teachers in every hallway? Is that what we want education to be in America? No.”

The legislation passed Wednesday wouldn’t allow any of the money to be used for equipping teachers with firearms.

Deutch and several other Democrats said they wanted to make sure that any anonymous trouble-reporting systems aren’t turned into vehicles that are used as weapons against minority students, who are often subject to tougher school discipline than white students.

It’s unclear just what results the legislation will produce. The legislation authorizes money, but no actual cash can get spent unless funding is included in a future appropriations measure. And the total amount of grants envisioned, $75 million a year for 10 years, averages just $765 a year for each of the nation’s 98,000 public schools.

And there is no indication of whether or when the Senate will take up its version of the bill, sponsored by U.S. Sens. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

President Donald Trump tweeted that “the House took major steps toward securing our schools by passing the STOP School Violence Act. … A tragedy like Parkland can't happen ever again!”

Many lawmakers praised the legislation, but that praise was accompanied by criticism from many Democrats, who decried the Republican majority’s unwillingness to consider anything that would restrict guns.

It was supported by Sandy Hook Promise, the organization that grew out of the elementary school killing of 20 first graders and six adults. It works to prevent gun violence and push for gun control laws.

Rutherford said the investments in early intervention and prevention would help keep students and teachers safe.

“We need to give students and teachers and law enforcement the tools that they need,” Rutherford said, drawing on his law enforcement background. “I do not want to be the best first responder to an active shooter event. I want to prevent that occurrence before it happens, and that is the goal of the STOP School Violence Act.”